I believe this is the highest new top level domain sale between a domain investor and a buyer. There have been larger public sales but they were directly between the registry and buyer.

Chad Wright of WebQuest sold the domain name. WebQuest has purchased many new top level domains and I see the company name showing up frequently in Whois on the best new TLDs combos.

I have confirmed that WebQuest originally purchased the domain from the registry as part of a three-domain package for $100,000. The domains were free.games, shooting.games and racing.games.

Wright said that he picked these names because they have high search volume. He thinks the domain could have sold for more.

“I knew this one could command a much higher price when the right time came,” he told Domain Name Wire. “Personally, I feel I sold it on the lower end of what it could have gone for but I need more Bitcoin.”

Nicolai Bezsonoff had a good job in banking in NYC when his friend Juan Calle called him and asked to meet. Juan told him about his plans to turn .Co into a brand and asked Nicolai to join him. Bezsonoff didn’t want to give up his good job to join a domain name company, but then he did what any banker would do: he ran the numbers. He liked what he saw and joined Juan as he relaunched the .co domain. Today, Nicolai joins us on the Domain Name Wire Podcast to talk about how he got into domains and his views on the industry as the current VP & GM of Registry Services for Neustar, which bought the .co registry. Hear his thoughts on what responsibilities registries should have around content, how registries can differentiate and more.

ICANN published its most recent Form 990 tax return last Friday (a convenient time to bury news). The return covers the financial year ending June 30, 2018. Here are some takeaways from the tax return:

GoDaddy has added its logo to sales landers on client domains, which should give a boost to inquiries and sales.

The company started by changing the branding from Afternic to GoDaddy on its own portfolio of domains. It simultaneously changed the serving for these domains to faster servers. It immediately saw a 10% conversion lift.

A few months ago it added the GoDaddy branding to for sale landers for domains added via Afternic, but not domains that were added via GoDaddy’s listing tool. Just recently it added it to all domain names.

The Afternic name isn’t well-known outside of domainer circles. GoDaddy is a trusted name, so it makes sense that potential buyers will respond better to this branding.

Company hires new counsel after being found guilty of reverse domain name hijacking.

Celgene is making a second attempt to get the domain name CellGene.com.

In February of this year, pharmaceutical company Celgene (NASDAQ: CELG) was found to have engaged in reverse domain name hijacking in its attempt to get the domain name CellGene.com. The World Intellectual Property Organization panel found that Celgene attempted to mislead the panel.

Now the company is using new counsel at Wiley Rein to try its hand in U.S. courts.

The $66 billion company filed an in rem lawsuit against the domain name in Virginia courts where .com registry Verisign is located.

The lawsuit is for violation of the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act (ACPA) and trademark infringement.

In the suit, Celgene points out that it believes the domain owner is PortMedia, the company that responded in the UDRP for the domain. It states that PortMedia has been found to have engaged in cybersquatting on at least five occasions and has handed over obvious trademark domains in other cases. (One of the examples it gives is for Esty.com — a case in which PortMedia actually won.)

The trademark infringement claim is notable. Even if the ACPA claim fails, Celgene shows screenshots of pay-per-click landers that had ads related to the pharmaceutical company.

Google sent an email to Adsense publishers today detailing some changes to its ads. It says:

We’re moving towards richer ad formats, phasing out text-only and display-only ad units to further improve user experience, and to fully reflect the pool of ads we have in the market. As a result, the “Text ads only” and “Display ads only” ad units in your account have been renamed to “Display ads” and from early 2019 will be updated to serve all ad types.

Text ad styles

We’re deprecating text ad styles for “Text & display ads” ad units. From now on, you won’t be able to create ad styles for your new ad units. Your new ad units will have Google-optimized text ad styling. As this feature is being deprecated, your existing ad styles will also be optimized by Google in the following months.

Google frequently adjusts based on the performance of its ads. Its text ads have become more stylized over time, adding simple elements like arrows. Now they are shifting more to include graphics and other elements.

The image at the top of this post is an example of new ad styles that Google says publishers might see on their websites. Note the addition of a logo with text or text overlaying an image.

While these might perform better, I doubt we’ll see many graphical elements on Google’s own search results.

Today’s tutorial aims to help create a simple tool that returns available domain names based on submitted keywords and domain ideas.

There is no shortage of domain name suggestion tools available when brainstorming what to name your next product, service, business, or project.

Before diving into today’s tutorial, please review and read previous tutorials to learn how to get started using GoDaddy’s API, and its various API endpoints offered to programmatically manage various aspects of your account.

At the end of this tutorial, you’ll find a link to download the zip file containing the entire code example for the domain name suggestion tool.

It’s also worth noting the tutorial code is procedural instead of object-oriented for the sake of simplicity, and not encouraged for use in or as production-ready environments.

Another key detail to pay close attention too, it ensuring you add/replace GoDaddy API credentials with your own credentials, or this tutorial will not work.

Without further ado, open up a text editor of your choice, and let us get started.

Again, I won’t dive into the details but will give a high-level overview of the necessary parts to use GoDaddy’s suggest method to retrieve a suggested list of alternate domains.

Creating search form for domain name suggestion tool

From a text editor of your choice, save and name the following php file: suggest.php. With main file created, the first item of business to address is the HTML form used to submit keywords. Copy and paste the following html into the suggest.php:

The code screenshot is really simple, containing a mix of PHP, HTML, Javascript, and CSS. The styling of the page can be found in the following css files for Bootstrap 3 and a local file I created (see zip file):

The last 10 or so lines of code in the suggest.php contains the logic to display a suggested list of alternate domains once the form has been successfully submitted.

Although contained in the suggest.php file, the results of the PHP code above are not visible from a web browser on initial page load. The form must be completed and submitted to reveal results.

With the frontend UI/UX in place, let us dive into the page functionality once submitting keywords or domains for suggested list of alternate domains.

Creating PHP logic for domain name suggestion tool

At the very top of the suggest.php file, copy and paste the following PHP logic:

The first item to note in the image is the use of PHP’s built-in define function, which is implemented to define the constant variable SITE_NAME (i.e., Domain Suggestions).

The next set of variables to define are mission critical to authenticate and instantiate a GoDaddy API request. The API_KEY and API_SECRET credentials can be obtained by visiting the API Key Management page.

After defining critical variables for GoDaddy API authentication, the next set of variables to define are as follows:

prepend – an optional variable if you would like to prepend alpha, numeric, or alphanumeric values to submitted keywords

searchDNAvailable – default variable used to trigger whether or not to display domain results each time the page is loaded or submitted. If value is 0, then no domains are shown (i.e., initial page load). If value is 1, then form was successfully submitted and suggested list of alternate domains are available for display.

The PHP logic for what should occur when form is submitted can be executed once variables are defined. The code below determines whether or not the submit button has been pressed.

If submit button has been pressed, then an error message is defined by default using the msg variable. In this case, the error message is displayed if the user clicks the submit button without entering a keyword.

The next few lines proceed to sanitize submitted keywords (i.e., $_POST[‘domain’] is cleaned and set as value of keywords variable) to ward off any hackers attempting to hijack the search tool should host on a public web server.

The last line of logic contains all the heavy lifting. If keywords variable is not empty and is defined, then the following variables are defined:

msg is set to equal nothing, and this now replaces the previous error message

searched is set equal to the getDomains function, passing typer as first argument and keywords as second argument

Completing the aforementioned variable definitions closes out the PHP logic for establishing and displaying the suggested list of alternate domains.

But not so fast though. If you were to open a web browser and attempt to execute code up to this point, you would encounter warnings of the following functions not defined: getDomains, RemoveSpecialChar, and printDomainResults.

Necessary PHP functions for domain name suggestion tool

Below is a high level overview of 3 critical functions necessary for successfully executing this tutorial (each function is included in suggest.php file):

getDomains

The getDomains function is the brains of searching and compiling the suggested list of alternate domains based on source (i.e., typer variable) and keyword (i.e., keywords variable). Within this function exists PHP’s built-in CURL method that makes the API request to the suggest method with submitted keywords and sources.

If hand registering domains is your strategy, or you simply need assistance in discovering an alternative domain for your next business, idea, project or whatever, this tool aims to help you save time and money.

With not much effort and slight modification to the printDomainResults function, you could easily host your very own domain search tool for the general public to use.

Take a look at this ad from the most recent issue of The Economist. What’s missing?

Yep, no domain name. No way to find out more.

It would be one thing if this company were a household brand, but most people haven’t heard of it. That’s why it’s advertising.

In fact, when I looked at the ad, I couldn’t quickly figure out what the brand was. Globality seems more like a slogan/tag line than a brand and the color blends in with the other text.

But the company is Globality and uses the domain Globality.com.

A couple of years ago Slack ran an ad in The Economist without a domain name. It added the domain to future ads. Don’t be surprised if Globality recognizes its mistake and adds its domain name in future ads, too.

An electronics trade association, a plant seller and a cryptocurrency company bought domain names this past week.

Sedo closed a whopper of a sale this past week–Cooking.com for $402,500. The domain doesn’t resolve and I haven’t been able to determine if it’s an end user buyer or an investor. But I was able to find 16 end user sales in Sedo’s most recent list.

Here’s a list of end user domain name sales that just completed at Sedo. You can view previous lists like this here.

HappyLook.com $40,000 – I’m a bit perplexed why the owner of quant trading company AG Capital bought this domain, but this is definitely an end user price.

Electronics.org €12,888 – What a great name for industry association IPC, which calls itself Association Connecting Electronics Industries.

GardenAngel.com $11,250 – The domain forwards to the website for plant company Monrovia. It has a trademark for Angel. Interestingly, someone else has a trademark for Garden Angel for a plant watering device.

Infralink.com $10,000 – M.C. Dean Building Intelligence designs commercial buildings and provides services (such as security) to them. I can’t find anything on its site about Infralink, but it sounds like a product it might offer.

Peter Askew returns to the podcast this week for an update on his projects. A story he recently published titled “I sell onions on the internet” went viral and sent over 100,000 visits to his website. Peter reveals the impact this had on sales, but that the bigger satisfaction for him was being able to spread the word about the value of domains. We also discuss his purchase of Onions.com, how one business failure led to a six-figure domain name sale, and his plans for BirthdayParties.com.

Registering a new domain name to launch a website? Make sure the content works well on mobile devices.

Google announced today that any new sites/domain names it indexes will be on a mobile-first basis. This means its Googlebot will crawl a mobile version of the site for indexing rather than a desktop version.

The search giant already does this for many websites, but for existing websites, it determines if they are ready for mobile first before using the mobile Googlebot. Not so with new websites; they must be ready to go out of the gate.

Of course, almost all new websites are mobile friendly and this is why Google is making the change.

In a blog post about the change, it noted that it still supports dynamic serving and mobile URLs but it advises against it. Instead, site owners should use responsive design. (Can we just get rid of .mobi already?)

I find Google’s desire for fully responsive sites to be somewhat in conflict with its AMP program, which uses separate URLs for fast-loading mobile pages.

Nelson Mandela Foundation Trust has won a cybersquatting dispute over the domain name Mandela.org.

The organization was established in 1999 when Nelson Mandela stepped down as President of South Africa. It was created for Mandela to do charitable work such as building schools, HIV/AIDS work and research. It now also handles the legacy of Mandela.

Google announced this morning that they are releasing their TLD registry platform, Nomulus, which is written in Java, under an Apache 2.0 license. The company uses the software to run their own registry for their TLDs. Portfolio TLD applicant Donuts has partnered with Google and contributed to the source code – they will also be running a public test instance of the system, which is geared towards being run on the Google Cloud Platform. So far, Rightside (NASDAQ: NAME) has been operating Donuts’ registry backend.

Today, Google is proud to announce the release of Nomulus, a new open source cloud-based registry platform that powers Google’s top level domains (TLDs). We’re excited to make this piece of Internet infrastructure available to everyone.

TLDs are the top level of the Internet Domain Name System (DNS), and they collectively host every domain name on the Internet. To manage a TLD, you need a domain name registry — a behind-the-scenes system that stores registration details and DNS information for all domain names under that TLD. It handles WHOIS queries and requests to buy, check, transfer, and renew domain names. When you purchase a domain name on a TLD using a domain name registrar, such as Google Domains, the registrar is actually conducting business with that TLD’s registry on your behalf. That’s why you can transfer a domain from one registrar to another and have it remain active and 100% yours the entire time.

The project that became Nomulus began in 2011 when the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) announced the biggest ever expansion of Internet namespace, aimed at improving choice and spurring innovation for Internet users. Google applied to operate a number of new generic TLDs, and built Nomulus to help run them.

We designed Nomulus to be a brand-new registry platform that takes advantage of the scalability and easy operation of Google Cloud Platform. Nomulus runs on Google App Engine and is backed by Google Cloud Datastore, a highly scalable NoSQL database. Nomulus can manage any number of TLDs in a single shared instance and supports the full range of TLD functionality required by ICANN, including the Extensible Provisioning Protocol (EPP), WHOIS, reporting, and trademark protection. It is written in Java and is released under the Apache 2.0 license.

We hope that by providing access to our implementation of core registry functions and up-and-coming services like Registration Data Access Protocol (RDAP), we can demonstrate advanced features of Google Cloud Platform and encourage interoperability and open standards in the domain name industry for registry operators like Donuts. With approximately 200 TLDs, Donuts has made early contributions to the Nomulus code base and has spun up an instance which they’ll be sharing soon.